henry sztul

Episode 1 of TechStars from this past Tuesday night.  Don’t forget to watch it next Tuesday @ 9PM EST

Drama, Action, Suspense.  TechStars has it all!

Under the new authentication program, only those willing to pay up can watch new episodes the day after it airs. Everybody else has to wait. Not all viewers have the patience, it turns out. In the absence of a free, immediately-available streaming option, many of them are turning to piracy, according to an informal study performed by TorrentFreak. The digital piracy news site tracked two Fox shows for five days after the authentication program began and found that the number of illegal downloads of new episodes increased substantially. Downloads of the most recent episode of Hell’s Kitchen increased by 114% and Master Chef saw a 189% increase in downloads.

These TV/Movie execs just DON’T get it!  They have seen the music industry go through almost the same exact thing over the past decade and a half and these people don’t seemed to have learned on thing!  

[time for some disruptive tech to swoosh in and win!]

[via As Fox Requires Web Viewers to Wait, TV Show Piracy Increases]

I like this splash screen! Again, @boxee, @ufl, @idancohen, and @dN0t were great to work with!

Boxee App developer Henry Sztul said: “Boxee is a fantastic service to bring Internet video into your living room. The UFL Boxee app will allow people to watch live games, games already played, and older video content on any TV in their home connected to a PC running Boxee or a Boxee-enabled device like the upcoming Boxee Box by D-Link. The ultimate goal is to provide a state-of-the-art sports viewing experience that cannot be found anywhere else online. As a developer, this has been an exciting project. Sports content like this just does not exist outside of traditional cable, and there are so many directions this could go technologically.

United Football League Announces Launch of Boxee App to View 2010 Season Games | UFL

Check out my new United Football League App featured on Boxee!  Football Live on your TV… WITHOUT cable! #awesome!

@boxee, @idancohen, and @@dN0t were great to work with!

[even better UI update in the works!]

(and yes, I watch Warehouse 13 :)

Keep F**king that Chicken!

I know am a little late on this one, but too funny to pass up.  Fox 5 News Clip of Ernie Anastos loosing a grip with decency. This is definitely not what the FCC deems “decent” to say on television!

siminoff:

For those who are out their pitching companies/products this is one of the better “how to” videos that I have seen.  I am meeting Mark on Friday for the first time, luckily I don’t have to pitch him as I am not sure if my skills are at his level:)

I think there is some great advice in here… I’ll tell you what though… the Fox people remind me why I don’t watch Fox news/any 24 hour news channel! Are they annoying!

As far as I can tell…
* $70 gets me countless commerical breaks where the sham-wow guy yells at me telling me that I live a boring life.
* $70 gets me cynical evening news broadcasts where I’m treated like an drooling idiot while “investigative” pieces have jingles telling me how I’m supposed to feel about them.
* $70 not spent on cable TV gets me $70 closer to a mac mini + Boxee

I’m reasonably sure that these companies are just enjoying one last hurrah before the giant race to the bottom. Soon they’ll all be nothing more than a pipe.

Ted Roden on getting HD from cable providers

I just wanted to throw this out there…

Last nights “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” might have had one of the funniest 10 minute segments I have ever seen on the show!  Between the first and second commercial breaks Jon (may I call you Jon?), spoke to the critics of Barack Obama that are calling him a tyrrant (yes they are surprisingly… e.g. Fox News) citing the ridiculousness and calling them out.

It was HILARIOUS and if I can post just that clip it will be posted here in the near future!

TV Is Dead: ABC and ESPN Might Be Coming to Hulu

PaidContent reports Disney is in “serious” talks to put ABC shows on Hulu. ESPN and Disney Channel could be on the table as well. Every major broadcaster but CBS on Hulu? TV is deeeeeeead. [via paidContent via gizmodo]

Meanwhile, NBC and Fox only get paid when you watch the TV shows on TV or cable, which gets them Nielsen ratings and subscriber fees. Internet revenues from the likes of Hulu are puny. So they can’t afford to lose viewers to Web video shows on TV when they need them to be watching TV shows on TV. That’s the gist of Zucker’s quote.
Longer term, this anti-customer strategy will fail. (See: Music industry v. Internet.) But perhaps it saves the networks a few years, and could open more opportunities for the cable industry to build up their on-demand content and technologies so that subscribers at least keep feeding the monster $80 a month.

NBC Boss Explains Why Boxee Users Can’t Have Hulu (GE, NWS)

My 2 cents: Go all the way or don’t do it at all.  The networks should put all their weight behind web technologies like Boxee.  Hell, make their own (isn’t that what hulu is?), I don’t care!  I think this is the quickest way to skirt this issue of ad revenue (hello, watches on Hulu will give 10x more info then Nielson ratings, eg IP, Location, Time of viewing, browser, OS, etc).  No brainer if you ask me!

BOYCOTT SUCCESSFUL! Hulu Back on Boxee! Yay!

Boxee: Latest Boxee Brings Hulu Back, Adds an App Box

So yesterday I got a little bogged down in the morning and my plans to leave City College before the Inauguration had to be modified.  I scrambled around and decided to watch the whole thing on the Internet via “the tubes.”

So, I loaded up the Hulu stream and enjoyed Fox News’ wonderful coverage.

Around 11:15 or there about I started to lose the feed.  It started to get choppy with the video first flciekring then followed by loss of audio.  In a panic I switched to the CNN live feed and was happy that it was in good shape.  If the video started to go out, at least the audio always stayed on.

Then 11:45 rolled around and all hell broke loose!  I lost the CNN stream and scrambled for my next alternative… C-SPAN to the rescue!  While I did receive the feed fine, the video was something like 250px x 250px of pixelated fuzziness. Nice, but I wanted “web 2.0” video goodness.

Then finally I saw that the NY Times had a feed on its homepage that was pretty good quality and not THAT choppy.  It only hung up exactly when President Obama was giving his address.  I thank the NY Times for their reliable service and hope they can navigate out of the choppy waters they find themselves in in this print-to-web transition we find ourselves in.

My read of TV on the Web:  We have a little way to go (read: a long way to go) before live streaming broadcasts are capable of handling the bandwidth to meet the demand of a broadcast such as an inauguration.  I think for watching repeats, syndicated shows, or movies, now is the time to start watching online.  Bandwidth for “live stuff” is not quite ready.

Continueing my train of thought form yesterday and developing on this idea of producing Internet TV…

The more I learn about blip.tv the more I really like blip.tv!
They seem to be positioned in such a way that really speaks to what I was talking about yesterday… in fact they have it all pretty much setup with advertising revenue sharing and all.  What is a little sad is that I am just learning about this…

So really the future is in creating, producing, and distributing good programming and getting a following.

One idea for a show is, um, tutoring! Right?

The show could follow a student for a year, reviewing concepts learned in a class on a daily, but probably weekly basis.
Take Pre-Calc, which I am working on with students recently.  Wouldn’t it be cool to be able to watch an episode of “Math Class Today” (or whatever it will be called) where it reviews the key concepts of the sections that covered this week?

An episode could cover: what is a one-to-one function?  how to find the inverse of a function… etc.  That would be an episode.
Each episode would prepare you for a test… or something like that… could also throw in a “where would i use this” section… just ideas of course. No lack of those!

i think this could be an “it” idea
thoughts?

TV is dead.  Long live TV!

Seriously, TV is dead.  Ok, maybe this is an overstatement, but I think Internet TV will be on the rise, and fast.  I believe Internet TV will be the next YouTube craze, Internet video on the TV, yay!

Right now there are a growing number of services like hulu.com and the big networks streaming video services are making this happen slowly but surely.  Application’s like Apple’s Front Row, Boxee, and XBMC are emerging as solutions to allow us to be entertained on our computers.

More important is that these so-called TV “solutions” allow us to now connect a computer to your TV, any computer, like that one sitting dormant in your basement (or storage container in your buildings’ basement, as in my case).

I think services like blip.tv and justin.tv are a new arena that something like this might be ready to distribute as well.

I especially think the time is right for an online variety show… like a recent event I attended in Tribeca last weekend called Pillow Talk, like an SNL broadcasted online.  This is a niche in online video that could take off…  especially based in NY.